from Jeff Z. Klein of the New York Times,

Thousands of miles wide, Canada is girded by a narrow belt of population stretched thin across its vast landscape. Hockey is the common experience shared in every large city and small town along the way.

Bryan Trottier grew up playing hockey in one of those towns, Val Marie, Saskatchewan. He went on to win six Stanley Cups, but on Thursday night he was in another small Canadian town, stepping to a microphone with a guitar.

“It’s great fun to be part of a super evening of great music, super songwriters and terrific performers, and you folks add to our enjoyment,” Trottier told the audience of about 600 at the community theater here.

Then he started strumming, the band joined in, and the whole audience clapped along to Buck Owens’s “Act Naturally.”

Trottier was in Lloydminster, an oil-patch town of 27,000 straddling the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, as a hockey player and a country singer, participating in Hockey Day in Canada festivities.

continued